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Announcing a new critique class online

Autumn Farm, evening blues, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed, includes shipping in continental US.

On April 24, I begin a new online critique class. When I first introduced this class back in 2021, I was very curious about how it would evolve. The idea wasn’t just to make specific paintings better. It was to help students develop a sort of executive function that would oversee their painting processes outside of class. This, as you can imagine, was much harder than “hold your brush like this” painting classes.

It was a success, and the proof is in the pudding. That coterie of initial students, for the most part, no longer need me to tell them how to analyze their work. That means that for the first time in a long time I have openings in a Zoom class. I call that success!

Clary Hill Blueberry Barrens, watercolor on Yupo, 24X36, $3985 framed includes shipping in continental US.

A good pairing with plein air

This class lines up with the beginning of plein air season in the north, which is convenient. It’s both a spur to students to go out and paint, as well as an opportunity for students to analyze and strengthen work they’ve done on their own.

Critique is a long-standing tool in every intellectual discipline, artistic and technical. However, it’s more straightforward to tell your co-worker, “I can’t duplicate your results,” than it is to put into words why a painting isn’t working.

What critique is not is an emotional response. It must be disciplined and systematic, but art is at the same time intuitive and subjective. We bridge that gap by analyzing works based on a series of objective design elements:

  • Focal point
  • Line
  • Value
  • Color
  • Balance
  • Shape and form
  • Rhythm and movement
  • Texture (brushwork)

These transcend style or period. Every painting includes them to some degree. The critic must consider how they work together. Do they coalesce into something arresting or not? If not, what forces are blocking the full expression of the artist’s idea?

Blueberry barrens, Clary Hill, oil on canvas, 24X36, $3985 framed, includes shipping in continental US.

The secret is in being nice

I’ve now taught several of these critique classes and the surprising thing is how warm and supportive they’ve been. We’re all intelligent adults; we understand that when our ideas aren’t working, it’s because we’ve run into a problem that another set of eyes can help us unravel.

The very first question we ask is, what was the goal of this painting? That’s not always simple, so it deserves time. Every subsequent point of discussion should be weighted in regards to that answer. For example, if what interested the painter was the loneliness of a home on a rocky crag, the composition, color, and brushwork must all support that aloofness.

Criticism is never mere fault-finding. There is a seed of brilliance in almost every painting, and it needs to be enlarged upon. That means discussing the merits of a painting as much as discussing its faults.

For critique to work well, the critic and artist must both approach the process with humility and mutual respect. I once took a painting I couldn’t finish to a noted teacher for criticism. She told me that it looked like a ‘bad Chagall.’ In trying to execute her ideas on the canvas, I destroyed my own vision. My self-doubt met her self-confidence in a terrible concatenation.

Fog over Whiteface Mountain, 11×14, $1087, includes shipping in continental US.

This class meets from 6-9 on:

  • April 24
  • May 1
  • May 8,
  • May 15,
  • May 22
  • June 5

For more information, see here.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Think with your hands

Think with your hands. 5X8, graphite on pencil in my sketchbook.

“I think with my hands, and it really cements my thoughts,” Theresa Vincent emailed me recently. She has a way with words; she’s the same person who told me a painting needs brides and bridesmaids.

I may be the only person in my church who draws, but I’m not alone in fussing while listening. There are occasionally people who knit, and lots of people who take notes. Whether they look back at them or not, writing notes results in better retention. More words are better than fewer, and writing by hand is better than tapping out notes in a phone or laptop.

Most importantly for us, drawing instead of writing results in even better memory retention. It doesn’t matter if what we’re drawing is ‘relevant’ or whether the pictures are objectively good.

Drawing in church. 5X8, graphite on pencil in my sketchbook.

Take that, every teacher who disciplined a student for drawing in class! I sure had those teachers; they made school a misery for me. Fifty years later, I realize I was a deeply-traumatized kid who needed help, but that wasn’t happening back in the 1970s. All I had was my pencil, and school had no room for free thinkers.

Fast forward to the aughts, when my own kids were in school. You’d think it would have been better after thirty years of child psychology, but school then was even more rigid and more disciplined. I knew several kids who were disciplined for drawing in class, including my own.

Drawing in church. 5X8, graphite on pencil in my sketchbook.

How does drawing help us remember?

Nobody knows precisely how this works, but it probably means that our moving hands help create new neural pathways to encode long-term memory. The brain-even the elderly one-continues to grow and mend itself. Even after great damage, like stroke or head injury, our brains make new neural pathways and alter existing ones. That’s how we adapt to new experiences and learn new information.

C. is a student in my Zoom brushwork class. She is 83 years old. The foolish might read that and think she’s an old lady taking art classes down at the senior center. They’d be all wrong. C. is a very serious painter, an excellent draftsman, and completely open to new ideas. Last week, I had my class do a small-brush exercise in the style of Les Nabis. It is difficult to give up the brushes you know and love, but C. embraced the challenge. And she crushed it.

Drawing in church. 5X8, graphite on pencil in my sketchbook.

Obviously, it’s not drawing alone that keeps C. youthful. She sails, she travels, and she has good genes. But art has a big place in her life.

Our brains are not the only way we think. We have a complicated autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system activates our fight-or-flight response; the parasympathetic nervous system restores us to calm. Our enteric nervous system, which controls our gut (and thus our ‘gut responses’) can operate independently of our brains. And the cool thing is, we’re just beginning to understand how these systems all work together.

I’d almost bet I drew this at Christmas. 5X8, graphite on pencil in my sketchbook.

But they do, so it’s not unreasonable for Theresa to say she thinks with her hands. It might be quite literally true.

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Monday Morning Art School: The golden light

Cypresses and shadows, 11X14, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 unframed includes shipping in continental US.

“Many plein air painters pick the worst light of the day to paint,” a reader emailed. “Photographers would never go out at 10 AM or 2 PM. So why are paint-outs called for those hours? The light sucks. And so do so many of the paintings.”

The short answer, my correspondent, is that life happens. I don’t paint at 7 AM-when the light is glorious-because dogs aren’t allowed off-leash in my local land trust after 9 AM. So, he gets his long run first and then I get to work.

Luckily, I live in Maine where the sun never climbs to the middle of the sky anyway. The closer to the equator, the more extreme the midday dead zone becomes. The closer to the summer solstice, the longer it lasts.

What do I mean by the midday dead zone? The light becomes cooler; shadows shorten and stop defining space. It’s possible to paint through this, but only when you’ve set up a composition in advance.

Blown off my feet, 16×20, $2029 framed includes shipping in continental US.

What color is light?

Most non-artists would tell you that light is white and shadows are grey. It takes practice to perceive the color of light. But light always has color. Outdoors, atmospheric noise bends and distorts the rays of the sun. Indoors, light bulbs are tuned to specific light spectra.

One of three situations prevails:

At midday, shadows are warm and the light is cooler.

In early morning and late afternoon, shadows are cool and the light is warm. This is also the prevailing light closer to the poles.

Shadows and light are neutral. This happens on grey days, when light and shadows are indistinct. This light has color, but it’s very subtle. Usually, you can pick it up by isolating the grey of the sky and determining if it’s warm or cool.

There are exceptions to this rule. For example, the cool light under a porch roof will produce even cooler shadows; our mind reads cool-and-cooler as indirect light. Or, light filtered through an awning will have a color cast from the fabric.

Beautiful Dream (Rockport Harbor), oil on canvasboard, 12X16 $1,449.00 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Don’t chase light and shadows

Instead of painting spasmodically fast, make a value sketch. This is the most important step in painting. Make a study, or multiple studies.

The value study is where one explores relationships and determines the ‘final cut.’ It’s far more helpful than slavishly transcribing a scene to canvas from a viewfinder. It’s in the value sketch that you make subtle adjustments to the elements for compositional purposes.

Most importantly, that value sketch in your notebook becomes your guide when the shadows and light flatten out. You’ve got their shapes recorded. You have a value structure recorded. You can use the changing scene in front of you to adjust details.

(But a warning: at some point the light will flip when the sun crosses the sky. At that point, it’s best to put away the painting and start another.)

Skylarking, oil on canvas, 24X36 $3,985.00 framed, includes shipping in continental US.

Use your sketchbook to record any spectacular lighting effects that whiz by

Atmospheric effects like crepuscular rays, breaking clouds and rainbows are transient. Before you add them, be certain they support your composition. If so, and you’re able to do so, paint them right in. If you’re not at that point of development, sketch what’s happening so you can refer back to your notes.

They may be beautiful but clash with your existing composition. If that’s the case, just sit back and enjoy them, or record them in your sketchbook for another painting.

Notice that I didn’t mention a camera

You should be able to develop a plein air painting without any relying on photo reference at all. If you can’t, then why?

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It helps to pay attention to the rules

Wreck of the SS Ethie, oil on canvas, 18X24, $2318 framed includes shipping in continental US.

This is a cautionary tale for autodidacts (people who teach themselves). As a group we are highly self-disciplined, curious, stubborn and creative, but we can also waste a lot of time and effort on rabbit trails.

The advent of social media was a great time for people like us to start marketing online, because nobody really ‘knew’ how to do it. But there were traditional ideas of marketing that would have been helpful. One of these was the so-called funnel. This is the path that a customer takes from first hearing your name to making a purchase. It includes the following steps:

  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Consideration
  • Intent
  • Purchase
The Wave, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 includes shipping in continental US.

Now you know more about the funnel than I ever did. I knew that marketers made big efforts to get people to sign up for their blogs and websites. Why bother, I asked myself. This blog has a high readership through its exposure on social media. (There’s that autodidact thing manifesting itself; we’re good at coming up with new ways of doing old things.)

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are not disinterested forums that can be used by little parasites like me. Emailing my blog directly, instead of relying on social media, would have been a Very Good Idea after all. *

Breaking Storm, oil on linen
Breaking Storm, 48X30, oil on linen, framed, $5579 includes shipping in continental US.

What does this have to do with painting?

I learned to paint from my father. He was born in 1924, and learned to paint before World War 2. His teaching model was less lecture and more letting me tag along with him while he drew and painted.

Later, I took classes at the Art Students League. I was shocked at what Cornelia Foss told me after she saw my first effort in her class.

“If this was 1950, I’d say ‘brava’, but it’s not.” She then proceeded to tear apart my technique and replace it with something more up-to-date.

It wasn’t just obsolete; it was in many ways bad. From Kristin Zimmermann, I learned about pigments. Somewhere along the line, I dropped the soup of turpentine that I’d been stewing my paintings in, turning them all a milky grey. And I learned how to draw the human figure with academic accuracy.

That’s not to say that everything I ever taught myself was bad; in fact, because I’m a voracious reader much of it was good. But I wasted many years on bad technique because I was too proud to ask for help.

Moonlight, c. 1885-95, Ralph Albert Blakelock, courtesy Phillips Collection. Yes, it’s mysterious and enigmatic, but it’s also falling apart.

Ralph Albert Blakelock was a celebrated painter of his day, achieving the highest price for a living American painter in 1916 with a version of Moonlight, above. His is a tragic story of celebrity, mental illness, abuse and swindle. Blakelock was largely self-taught. Being that kind of creative thinker, he would tinker with the processes of painting. He often mixed bitumen and varnish for rich depth of color in his thick, uneven paint. That has proved to be a conservation disaster, so when we look at his paintings today, we aren’t seeing what he laid down. In fact, in most of them tonalism has been replaced by something grubby and dark.

Autodidacts, it doesn’t hurt to ask for help occasionally.

*You can sign up for my newsletter, by the way, in the little box on the right. And it might be wise to ‘whitelist’ me; I lost Bruce McMillan’s wonderful newsletter for a while because gmail sent it to my spam folder.

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Reference photos for painters

Winter Lambing, oil on linen, 30X40 in a slim black frame, $6231 includes shipping in continental US. This was painted from a reference photo of a snowdrift in Orleans County, New York.

The ‘pictures’ folder on my laptop has more than 50,000 images in it. I don’t have an easy way to count my cell-phone images, but they date back to 2003. There are thousands more photos on our server.

The vast majority of these serve no purpose. They’re not a record of an event or people I love; they’re just a visual that caught my eye while I was hiking or painting. They were quickly seen and more quickly forgotten. Luckily, when I die, my kids won’t have to lug them to the dump in plastic bin bags; they’ll be gone with a click of the mouse.

Compared to other artists, I don’t take many reference pictures at all. That sometimes proves to be a problem when I have a thorny painting problem to solve, but often reference pictures serve to confuse rather than clarify issues.

All Flesh is as Grass, oil on linen, 30X40 in a slim black frame, $6231 includes shipping in the continental US. This was painted from a photo of a neighbor’s apple tree.

Great photos don’t mean great paintings

“Surprisingly, a great photo often doesn’t make for a great painting,” Bruce McMillan wrote this week. “It’s already a success as a photo. Most of my reference photos are failures as photos, but hold the elements that I want to enhance in a painting.”

A great photo-taken by you or someone else-has already done the design work. You’re constrained in composition and color because those elements are pre-determined. That’s one reason I discourage my students from using photos they find on the internet.

Of course, respecting copyright is the primary reason. Any photo or illustration you find in books, magazines, newspapers, or the internet is automatically protected by copyright law.

Even if that wasn’t true, I’d still discourage painting from other people’s photos. When you take a picture yourself, you have felt the dirt and smelled the air of the place. You understand the depth and breadth of its space. If you’ve taken the time to make a sketch, you comprehend it even more deeply.

You have none of that with a photo you grabbed from the internet. How much do you expect people to engage with an idea that you, the artist, have no relationship with? That comes back to my cardinal rule of painting: don’t be boring.

The Harvest is Plenty, oil on linen, 40X30 in a slim black frame, includes shipping in the continental US. This was painted from my own head.

Take your own pictures where you can

Anyone can take a decent photo with a modern cell phone, as I prove every morning when I hike up Beech Hill. I was a ‘better’ photographer before I started painting full-time. My compositions were tighter. Then I realized that my best photos were cropped too tight to be useful for painting. There was always something left out that I needed.

Now when I take reference pictures, I make a point of shooting far more peripheral material than I would for an artistic shot. This is because I’ve outsmarted myself too many times by cropping out essential information in the viewfinder. Detail is generally unimportant in a reference photo, and most modern cameras (including the one in your cell phone) have far greater resolution than the artist ever needs.

Deadwood, 30X40, oil on linen, $6231 in a slim black frame includes shipping in continental US. This was based loosely on a photo taken by my friend Joe Wagner.

Flat, indirect light can be boring in a landscape painting, but it’s sometimes helpful in a reference photo. It allows you to create your own atmospherics. You’re never stuck fighting a lighting source that doesn’t work.

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Monday Morning Art School: Brides and bridesmaids

Today’s blog was delayed due to a DDOS attack on my server. I’m assuming it was by a jealous blogger. 😊

Poplars at Giverny, Sunrise, 1888, Claude Monet, courtesy MoMA.

“You have three colors in this painting battling for supremacy,” I told Theresa Vincent during last week’s lesson on color. “One of them can dominate; the others need to be somewhat muted.”

“Ah,” she answered in her melodious Texas twang. “There can be only one bride; the others have to be content to be bridesmaids.”

Until that moment, I hadn’t been thinking of the red gazebo roof in her painting as Bridezilla, but it worked. In a triad color scheme (which is what Theresa was working in), all three colors can’t be of equal intensity. One must lead. Consider Monet’s Poplars at Giverny, Sunrise, above, which is a triad of green, orange and purple. The green is the star of the show, followed by the orange and purple.

Monet also demonstrated that even at the most carefully-controlled event, every wedding guest should be welcome to wear what they want (within the limits of propriety, of course). His painting is dotted with hints of accidental color. There are blues and yellows, pinks, and even red at the party. A color scheme is the guiding principle, but it isn’t dictatorial. Brilliant paintings have guests from every position on the color wheel.

I’ve written about the basic color harmonies here; understanding them will help you integrate color in your painting. It’s not necessary to memorize these harmonic schemes; the greater lesson is that color harmonies matter.

Arrangement in Gray: Portrait of the Painter, c. 1872, James McNeill Whistler, courtesy Detroit Institute of Arts. Whistler was enamored with monochromatic grey.

Color is fashion-based

The stylish Victorian matron avoided pastels; she decorated in maroon, red, burgundy, chestnut, and dark green, brown and blue. Her Art Deco granddaughter loved bright yellow, red, green, blue, and pink. Neither would have tolerated the monochromatic grey that dominated interior design a decade ago. Our color choices are fashion-based and what looks good to you and me will probably not appeal to our kids.

Each color harmony has multiple permutations, since you can start at any position on the color wheel. Then there is the question of which color leads, to which end you could either use higher chroma or allow it to take up more real estate on your painting. By the time you’re done considering the options, you realize that just about any color scheme you can develop fits somewhere in that chart of color harmonies.

Above Lake Garda at San Vigilio, 1913, John Singer Sargent, source unknown. Sargent loved his complements.

Does that mean you can just ignore color schemes? Of course not. It means you should be inventive but aware. Otherwise, you just might end up in the situation that Theresa found herself, where the bride and bridesmaids are squabbling over who’s in charge.

You should also be aware of how colors influence their neighbors. The definitive text on this is Interaction of Color, by Josef Albers. If you take away one thing from it, it will be the importance of setting values early in the process.

Regatta at Argenteuil, c. 1872, Claude Monet, courtesy Musée d’Orsay, is a split-complementary color scheme.

The same is true of focal points

I’ve written before about the importance of multiple focal points in drawing the eye through the painting. They should be intentional. But, again, only one gets to be the bride, drawing viewers into the painting. The rest, like good bridesmaids, should be quiet supporting actresses.

If focal points aren’t intelligently designed, and you’re not drawn through them with contrast, line and detail, then it’s back to the drawing board for you.

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Put down the red pen

Ravening Wolves, oil on canvas, 24X30, $3,478.00 framed includes shipping in continental US.

On Wednesday, I wrote, “Not creating is a safe position from which to operate. Your talent is inviolable, protected, a seed not open to criticism… That gives you the latitude to criticize other creators, as you are protected from criticism yourself.”

That relationship between nonachievement and criticism is famous in art schools, where bitchiness itself is often raised to a fine art. This video was a one-hit wonder but it captures the experience.

The Logging Truck, 16X20, oil on canvas, $2029 framed, shipping included in the continental US.

The best painters I know are also the most generous critics. They’re courteous and supportive of even the most tentative of efforts. They understand how murky and undeveloped radical new ideas can be, and they’re as curious as anyone as to how they will turn out.

“Put down the red pen,” is an editing maxim (from when writers used pens). It means that the editor should read through a piece first, with an open mind, before starting to make corrections. By coming at a piece flourishing your metaphorical red pen, you’re inclined to start rewriting the piece as you would have written it. That leaves no room for the writer’s own voice or goals.

The same is true with painting. We need to first step back and look and think. When we intervene too forcefully at the beginning, we supersede the artist’s ideas, style and voice. We take on the responsibility for refinement without asking whether that’s helpful or not. ‘I know better than you’ becomes our primary message. That might feel good (temporarily) to the critic, but it can be paralyzing to the painter.

Hostile input shuts us down

There’s plenty of science to tell us that the brain just shuts off at the first hint of stress. Comments that are perceived as personal attacks can set off a cascade of chemical events that weaken our impulse control or paralyze us with anxiety. We’ve all seen the Gary Larson cartoon (above) about what dogs hear when we yell at them. The same is particularly true of teenagers, and to a lesser degree, everyone else.

At my age, I don’t need to be diplomatic, but I do need to be kind. That’s not a moral imperative; I just want my students to hear me. One important way forward is to divorce feelings from criticism. I dislike comments that start with, “I feel…” What you feel about the artist’s use of line, color, shape and form is immaterial. What matters is what you think about those things.

Wreck of the SS Ethie, oil on canvas, 18X24, $2318 framed.

Objectivity is our goal

Here is a framework for objective criticism. These aren’t my ideas; they’re standard criteria for design. Obviously, there’s room in critique for the subjective, since art is ultimately a personal expression. However, these questions can also be framed in non-inflammatory ways. “Does this evoke a response in you,” is a very different question from, “is this painting boring?”

It’s far healthier to learn to apply these standards of criticism to your own paintings than to cast around for approval from your peers (although we’ve all done it). Learning to critique your own work as you go will save you a lot of flailing around.

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If not today, when?

Matt in his down coat, drawing at Sedona. He was not overdressed for the weather. (Photo courtesy Ed Buonvecchio)

Yesterday, I ambled around the grounds of the French Legation State Historic Site in Austin musing about my plans for Sunday. The air here is clear and warm, the bluebonnets are blooming, and the trees are leafing out-perfect conditions for a day with horses.

Then I remembered that my pal Sarah and the stable are back home in Maine. They’re about to receive another blast of arctic air, dropping temperatures back into the 20s and bringing more of the foul ‘mixed precipitation’ that so bedeviled last week’s workshop in Sedona. That’s my current disconnect.

Nita wore a sock over her casted hand to keep it warm. (Photo courtesy Ed Buonvecchio)

Last week’s weather was awful for plein air painting. However, I had a dedicated band that stuck it out. Nita had a pickleball fracture in her right arm. She’s a southpaw but she could only use watercolor, as managing pastels was impossible without two hands. In the cold, her injury started to throb. She painted, quietly excused herself to warm up her errant limb or go to physical therapy, and then returned. Every day.

Joan had never painted before. On my recommendation she bought a gouache kit and drove down from Seattle. No matter how grim the weather, she gamely stayed with me, exercise after exercise. At the time, I thought, “this is an awful introduction to painting; she’s never going to want to do this again.” Still, she learned the fundamentals. She says she’s going to keep with it.

Joan listening to me carrying on. (Photo courtesy Ed Buonvecchio)

What’s got you rattled?

I can think of a million reasons to not paint today. In fact, I can find a million reasons to not paint every day. I’ve written before about how Ken DeWaard, Eric Jacobsen, Björn Runquist and I can dither. There are legitimate reasons why your creative impulses are blunted, including bad weather, work, children, or storms of grief or anxiety.

We all suffer from competing demands that distract us from what we need to do. For me, for years, it was my house. I couldn’t paint if it was a mess, because disorder always feels like a tide about to engulf me

Most of us have creative impulses-to write, to paint, to build furniture, to design beautiful interior spaces or gardens. The vast majority of us never do anything with those impulses, claiming a lack of time or energy. That’s despite being able to binge-watch television shows, slavishly follow the Buffalo Bills, or (in my case) read bad novels.

Joy and Matt persevering despite the cold. (Photo courtesy Ed Buonvecchio)

Are you hiding from the challenge?

Not creating is a safe position from which to operate. Your talent is inviolable, protected, a seed not open to criticism. You remain assured that you’re really a genius, which could suddenly be apparent as soon as you have the time or focus to start creating.

That gives you the latitude to criticize other creators, as you are protected from criticism yourself.

Many of us-most of us, in fact-will go to our graves never having moved past the ‘potential’ position. Those who do experience a transition to deep humility as we start to work through all the ways our craft can go wrong. We’re no longer so quick to have opinions about other work, because we recognize the struggle in which it was created.

But first you must start.

Whatever creative task you are called to do, there is always a day you must start doing it, instead of merely thinking about it. This might be that day, my friend.

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The most important rule of painting

It’s a start. Maybe I can even finish it before I leave!

Last March when I taught in Sedona, it was t-shirt weather. Our biggest dilemma was which day we should visit the winery. This year the weather has been terrible. Even I, an incurable optimist, can’t deny that.

The historic snows and rains that have pounded California have not left Sedona unscathed. Flood-prone areas were on high alert yesterday. State Route 89A closed in both directions between Sedona and Flagstaff due to rock slides.

Arizona has close ties to California, and people here have shown me pictures of their favorite ski resorts in the Sierra Nevada, where some places have seen close to 100 inches of new snow in the month of March alone. I’m from Buffalo and that number astounds me.

We’re not getting that, but we have had mixed precipitation and cold weather all week. It’s maddening when we’ve invited people to paint en plein air and they’re stuck inside, as beautiful as the teaching studio is at Sedona Arts Center. I want my students to be happy, and circumstances beyond human control are making that difficult.

“It’s the beginning of a new Ice Age,” I grumbled, and my student Maggie laughed and agreed.

Snow is welcome in December; at the end of March it’s just annoying.

This weather isn’t helping my slump

Maggie and her pal Beth wisely decided to paint indoors yesterday. The rest joined me at Secret Slickrock trailhead. Rain eddied and blew through the massifs, and Oak Creek roared in its rain-swollen channel below us. It would have been magical if the weather hadn’t been so stubbornly uncooperative. One by one, my students retreated to the warmth of their cars until it was just Matthew, Laura and me left.

I’ve been in a painting slump recently. There are all kinds of reasons for slumps, including health problems, pressure at work, grief and much more. Being able to identify the cause doesn’t necessarily solve the problem, but it does help me to feel better. And I know why I’m here. I’m spending most of my creative energy developing an online painting course. I’m alright with that trade-off, but it’s frustrating when I can steal a moment to paint and dreck comes off my brush.

Matthew is wearing three layers under that boilersuit. It’s a wonder he can stand up and waddle to his car.

But here I was on the top of a bluff and most of my students had left. I laid in a quick painting, breaking rules I drill into my students. I made no preparatory value sketch because I’d loaned my sketchbook out and hadn’t retrieved it. I did major design surgery in the middle of the painting. The painting is unfinished, because the rain and snow started sheeting down on us again. (Oil paint turns into stodge when it absorbs enough water.) And of course I don’t have a reference photo; I never remember to take them.

Yet I’m happier with this start than with anything else I’ve done since January.

Sometimes we go through dry periods. Sometimes we break rules we know are important. But the most important rule of all is to show up. Yes, you’re very likely to make a bad painting when you’re in a slump, but you stand a zero chance of making a good one if you don’t paint at all.

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Sit still and sketch the world

I’m in Arizona, teaching an annual workshop for the Sedona Arts Center. This has been an unusual year for the west, with snow, rain and cold in spectacular amounts. Still, my stalwart and stoic students are pushing through it.

Yesterday, we painted under the ramada at the Red Rock District Visitor Center in Coconino National Forest. We watched low-hanging clouds play peek-a-boo with Bell Rock, Courthouse Butte, and the surrounding massifs. It poured steadily all day. The high desert struggles to absorb it, as evidenced by Dry Beaver Creek in the video above, shot by my monitor, Ed Buonvecchio. Normally, this is a dry wash. I am staying in a casita above a tributary of Dry Beaver Creek, and as I listen to the rain sheeting down the tiles of my roof this morning, I wonder if the road will hold.

Laura Felina had the ranger station stamp her sketchbook. What a cool idea!

The manager of the Visitor Center welcomed us. “We like to demonstrate that there are many ways to appreciate nature besides hiking,” she said. She mentioned that she took up watercolor sketching herself during the pandemic, and now hikes with a small portable paint kit and sketchbook.

“You see things differently when you’re hiking from when you’re standing still,” she told me. I’ve experienced this myself. I’ve had elk, small animals and birds come out of the forest near me.

Dry Wash, 12X16, oil on canvasboarad, Carol L. Douglas, $1159 includes shippng in continental US.

It’s not what you see, it’s how you see

Mostly, it’s not what you see but how you see that changes. You start with the panorama, the ‘money shot,’ as we so blithely call it. The big, spectacular massifs catch your eye. But spend time standing still in the desert and other things begin to catch your attention: rock piled on rock, the smell of creosote bush, juniper and piñones on a hot day, or the play of light on a canyon wall.

Back up slowly through all the forms of locomotion, and think of how each one changes your perception. Hiking, you see detail, but in rocky terrain you spend much time checking your footing. In a jeep or four-wheeler, you’re moving slowly enough to appreciate the rise and fall of the land, but you’re never in one spot long enough to savor the subtle interplay of light and shadow. In a car, you see only the big picture.

Our roads and parks make nature accessible to everyone. That’s in contrast to the 19th century, where you had to be either rich or an adventurer to get back of beyond. I might bemoan the damage that off-roading does to the environment, but it makes it possible for people with mobility issues to get out into nature.

I love all four speeds of appreciating the environment: sketching, hiking, four-wheeling, and long drives. As a nation, however, we do way too much of the latter, and not enough of the former.

We’ll be inside this morning until the weather clears, but we’re making the best of it!

My late friend Helen lived in a run-down section of North Braddock, Pennsylvania, which is itself a clapped-out old steel town. Helen wasn’t very mobile, so she appreciated nature from her porch. There was an empty lot next door. Every spring, she’d send me pictures of the weedy scrub coming into bud and flower. She was still enough to see beauty where others just saw urban blight. Sometimes she’d send me a picture she’d painted using copy paper and a paint set she bought at Dollar General.

Be more like Helen, and you’ll start to see your world differently. “But I can’t draw!” you say. Helen didn’t let that stop her. When you were a child, you knew how to draw a flower. What made you lose confidence in your ability?

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